<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Underground artists by TheWrongKindOfPC</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465704">Underground artists</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC'>TheWrongKindOfPC</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>It’s happening now. It’s happening again. [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Wicked + The Divine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Origin Story, Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:54:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465704</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Precedent isn’t destiny. If it’s my power, and my fear, I can channel it into something else.” As more new fears emerge, Ananke finds her first challenger among the expanding pantheon.</p><p>The Marian/Cameron&amp;Umar triptych.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Baphomet &amp; Dionysus (The Wicked + The Divine), Baphomet/Morrigan (The Wicked + The Divine)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>It’s happening now. It’s happening again. [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851541</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. 9.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>9)</p><p>“I don’t know how you do it,” a primary school friend told Marian as she hopped to the ground after one of a summer-hazy whirlwind of displays of derring-do. Marian smiled because it was true: Imelda <em>didn’t</em> know how she did it, and the fact that she still thought of it as a question of “how” proved that she never would. There was no “how.” That was Marian’s secret. She just <em>did it</em>.</p><p>“It’s all in the wrist, Imelda!” Marian trilled, bored already and hopping up on the ledge running around the edge of the playground to try a cartwheel.</p><p>“That doesn’t even make sense!” Imelda said, and it was true, the wrist didn’t have all that much to do with flipping off the swing set one way or another, but Marian’s <em>tone</em> was true, and that was what mattered. “And my name’s not Imelda!”</p><p>“It is now,” Marian called back over her shoulder. She knew she was lucky when it came to given names, but she definitely couldn’t have an attendant named <em>Anne</em>, not if she was going to be Queen of the Night.</p><p>And she was. She was Queen of the Night again and again in a hundred different ways as she grew. Attendants came and went (Imelda turned back into Anne and left before the afternoon at the park was over), consorts were tested out and discarded, and then there was Cameron, and even if his name was all wrong and he was as likely to joke about the game as to play along, Marian thought perhaps he would Do. And then his parents passed, and rather than retreating into Marian’s darkness to heal, he pushed her away.</p><p>When Ananke showed up and told Marian that she was the rending teeth and claws stained with blood and clenched around the throat of the universe, Marian didn’t stop to think about how The Slaughter had never been a three-faced, threefold goddess, or, indeed, a goddess at all, before — she just <em>became</em>. She was the building fury before the battle; she was the blood flying and the bodies falling; she was the gentle-eyed scavenger making her way across the empty, quieting battlefield, only corpses for company.</p><p>After, everything felt like a dream, like all of Marian’s dreams and games, a whole lifetime of them, had been practice for this very moment. Unthinking, cloaked in a power she could now tell she’d been reaching for her entire life, she called her disciples to her. All who were predisposed to hear her call would come, and if a part of her particularly hoped to see one specific face in the crowd, well, that was one of the benefits of being a threefold goddess: plenty of faces to hide behind.</p><p>…</p><p>He’s only Cameron for a few hours, technically, as far as Umar knows him, before he is The Buried One. Cam workshops the longer-form name “He Who Emerges From The Grave,” but his and Marian’s plans seem to mostly revolve around staying deep within the tunnels, which makes the longer name feel misleading.</p><p>“I like a good mislead,” Cam says, “But it has to serve the story, it can’t just be there for the aesthetic, or we’ve got no more literary integrity than a three a.m. creepypasta thread.”</p><p>“Integrity is not my king’s forte,” Marian says, with the kind of menace in her tone which would scare Umar if it were not <em>absolutely</em> an aesthetic choice more than a pragmatic one. She twines around Cameron from behind, and Umar wonders if they use the same hair dye — the unnatural black locks on both of their heads glinting with the same purplish tint in the uneven light.</p><p>Umar likes her, he thinks — she’s as magnificent as Cameron promised on the drive to the gig, which is actually a surprise, since he had definitely talked about her impressiveness as a performer in the tones of someone who was already deeply and personally in love with her. She’s also got a commitment to the bit that it’s impossible not to respect; avatarship seems like a pretty raw deal in a lot of ways, between the historical vilification and the rumored death after two years of unequaled power, but Marian seems to have taken the negatives in stride.</p><p>“It is worth it for a chance to offer others the chance to touch the darkest heart of the universe,” she says, dreamily, when he asks her about it. It’s a little off-putting, honestly, but he’s pretty sure it’s just what she’s like, and Umar makes a point to take people as they are, rather than expecting them to act like anything else for someone else’s comfort, so in that way, Marian’s jagged personality is somewhat soothing.</p><p>But the point is that he’d only known Cameron a few hours, between picking him up, bedraggled and lop-sided-smiling, from the rain-drenched side of the road and the end of Marian’s gig, when Cam told Umar and his friends to go on, that Cam would wait, that he needed to talk to Our Lady of Bloody Beak and Claw. And the next night, when Umar comes once again to The Slaughter’s underground house of worship, she is not alone. As she explains it, The Carnage of The Battlefield has taken The Quiet of the Grave to be her consort.</p><p>Cam isn’t very quiet, though — he still tosses out desperate puns like sweat running off his skin, and Marian snarls back in fury at the undermining of her design, and if the young woman with the green dip-dye job hadn’t appealed to Marian’s more theatrical face, Umar doesn’t know what the evening might have turned into.</p><p>After the cops come, and one is struck down, and Marian shifts sideways until she’s someone else, a face Umar hasn’t seen yet, and then the cop — the moments-ago-very-dead cop — is up and walking again, there is a party. Umar’s always down to party, honestly, but there’s something a little uncomfortable in the air, and it isn’t just the almost-murder, so when the bulk of the crowd starts to drift away at the end of the show, Umar thinks he might go with it.</p><p>He might, but he’s not quite quick enough. Cam sidles up to him as he collects himself in the shadow of the tunnel wall and says, “Had enough already?”</p><p>That much is still fine, actually. Cam may be The Buried One, but he’s still <em>Cam</em>, and Umar thinks he could still say yes, yes he’s had enough and follow the rest of the parts of the crowd that still have a sense of self-preservation up out of this hole in the earth and back into the open air. Cam isn’t quite the muddy grave-matter trying to suck him back in — not yet anyway — but Marian’s eyes follow him with all the hunger of the battlefield. Before Umar has even decided how he’s going to respond, Marian has made her way to Cam’s side, and when she holds out a regal hand to Umar, something in him understands that the heart of her is a battlefield; if he’s not by her side, he’s going to be her next target. He takes her hand and follows her deeper.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. 10.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>10)</p><p>As a child, Cameron had flipped the script, his father had said, for childhood nighttime fears. He’d been unafraid of any imagined monster under the bed — a babyish fear, nothing based in reality — but afraid, instead, of the bigness of the room, and his smallness within it. Every morning before school the year he was six, his dad had come into the room to wake him and found him fast asleep, curled up under the bed. Even at the time, he’d known that putting himself into a smaller space wouldn’t make the world outside any less overwhelming; he’d known he was playing tricks on himself, and as he’d gotten older, he’d only found newer, better tricks. Role-play reduced the world to the size of the room they met in, the imagined bigness of the world they created nothing but an illusion in a way that was reassuring. He’d stood graveside, after his parents passed, thinking about the illusory safety of the space under the bed.</p><p>His Nan had wanted an open casket for a chance to say goodbye, and while Cam had felt an un-goth-like instinctive discomfort with the idea, he hadn’t argued, so he could picture the way they looked in their coffins perfectly, as they were lowered into the ground. With the lid closed, Cam mused, lying in one of those things must have felt not too different to lying on his back under the bed, looking up at the patches of mattress visible between the slats, so much warmer and closer and less sharply alien than stars overhead, or even the murky distance between the top of the bed and the space where glow-in-the-dark stars had been pressed messily against the cracking plaster of the ceiling above the bed. Marian had been beside him then, mist-damp and confiding, a firm, bony little hand tucked into his own, and though he’d done his very best to drive her away after that, now she was beside him again, and it was Cameron’s own turn to be buried.</p><p>The evening after Cam had come to Marian’s — to <em>The Morrigan’s</em> gig, she’d taken him by the hand and lead him deeper into the tunnels, so like the tunnels they’d played at vampires in just the year before, and he’d followed her because he always followed her, and because walking deeper into the darkness felt right, and not just symbolically, but physically, deep in his bones.</p><p>At the end of the tunnel, a gray-wrapped, gray-faced old woman shone out from the darkness like the moon, an unwelcome intrusion against the heavy, chill comfort Marian’s tunnels. At the sight of her, Marian had slowed a little, something almost — but not quite — like hesitation coloring her steps. “Come, Slaughter,” the old woman called out to them. “Let us see if any of the fears reach a hand forward in friendship to your consort.”</p><p>…</p><p>It’s beautiful down here, but it’s no kind of life, and it’s all the life left that they’re going to get. That’s what Cam keeps thinking, gazing up at the rough-hewn arches in the ceiling. Two days in, maybe, and he knows he’s supposed to feel transformed, but he mostly just feels like himself. Speaking power with Marian, that had felt like transformation, like death and rebirth and death again all at once, but once the power has faded, he’s just Cameron in a slightly more dramatic getup. He shifts his shoulders uncomfortable under where the smooth material of the lining of the jacket sticks to his skin. It suits him, the him he’s trying to be now. He knows this even though there are no mirrors down here, because when he’d put it on, Marian’s eyes had narrowed a little in thought, and then power had flickered in her hand, and then the ram’s head charm on the heavy chain had settled around his neck and she’d nodded her head in that satisfied way she’d always done when the twist in a movie unfolded as she’d predicted.</p><p>Bare chest under leather jacket is hardly a practical look, but what’s practicality to a god, anyway? Cameron supposes he’s beyond such things now, and he’s never had much of a knack for them before.</p><p>In this last year, in his grief, Cam has been sinking. He’d thought, when he bothered to think about it at all, that he was past whatever survival instinct might once have kicked in to send him scrambling to the surface, but now that he’s let his tie to Marian marry him to the underworld like Persephone, like Nergal, he feels some buried part of himself trying to rise to a surface that isn’t there anymore.</p><p>“Don’t make me laugh,” Marian says, or maybe quotes — whether the words were hers first or not hardly matters, she’s always been the best of anyone he knows at borrowing other people’s faces and making them her own. “You’ve been flirting with death for years, long before you fell into darkness.”</p><p>Cam thinks idly that in one of his more shit-heel moods, he might have called her on the excessive floweriness of language, there, which she’s been allowing to slip deeper and deeper into her speech patterns since she’s been the goddess of the Slaughter, but he can, actually, recognize the circular description for what it is: a kindness stopping her from simply saying <em>since your parents died,</em> simple and unadorned.</p><p>Still, “That’s not the same,” he snaps back, “And you know it as well as I do. The trappings are fun,” he says, and waves a hand at their surroundings, the cobweb-draped corridors, the rusting, useless old fixtures still hanging useless and forlorn on the walls, casting ominous shadows ever time a candle flickers or a fire-hazard of a lantern sitting on the floor tempts fate further by getting a careless kick or jostle from someone walking or dancing by, “But you know as well as anyone that the trappings are all it is for most people. They love you,” Cameron says, casting his eyes around the riotous die-hards of the after-party, “But how many of them do you think would actually follow you into battle? Half? Less? No one actually wants to die for you, Marian.”</p><p>She laughs, then. It may be the coldest thing she’s ever said to him, and it’s not in words at all, just laughter that rasps like the scrape of metal against bone, which isn’t a sound or vibration that Cameron has ever heard or felt, it’s not a comparison he’d make to himself in the privacy of his own mind unless he were trying to compose a piece of dark and overwrought poetry, but as Marian laughs he can feel the comparison deep in his nerves, the power of her intention radiating into his own perceptions with no regard for his own actual frame of reference.</p><p>She laughs, and she’s right to laugh. The trouble, Cameron thinks, with arguing with someone you’ve already hurt, already betrayed and proved yourself unworthy of, is that from then on, she’s always going to know it. Even when he’s right, he’s going to be wrong. From now until eternity — that or until their untimely deaths some time in the next two years. Whichever comes first. She laughs and she raises her hands, and, like dogs to a hunting horn, all of the party-goers lift their heads, too, eyes turning to Marian, breathing hard like they’re scenting the air.</p><p>All of them except for Umar.</p><p>Marian lets her hands drop, and the party resumes with an odd little hitch, rumbling forward after a skip on the record. Marian says, “They’d all die for me. They won’t, probably. But they would. The only person here with commitment issues is you, my little king.”</p><p>Cameron knows his line here, and he knows he’d damn well better hope that it’s true. “That’s what you like about me, though.”</p><p>“Sure,” Marian agrees, smile quieter than it has been in hours, days. “For now.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. 11.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>11) </p><p>And the party in the tunnels goes on and on and on and on. Phones don’t work down here, and before long it’s impossible to tell whether it’s been five hours or five days. Umar loves it, in a way — he’s always been the type to stay all the way up until last call, leaned up against the counters with the slumped-over barflies or out on the dance floor until the lights come up and the bouncer hustles everyone off the floor.</p><p>Still, nobody can go forever — seven hours or seven days or seven years in, even Umar’s body needs a dance-break or a caffeine injection, even Cam and Marian have hit a lull in their cycles of furious argument and furious making out in a corner. Marian has retreated to what she’s referred to as her <em>grotto</em>, and Cam sought Umar out, earlier, coming up to the crowd Umar was dancing in and leaning up against the wall to watch until the song came to an end. In the momentary quiet, Umar had come up to lean against the wall next to him, and in that moment of rest, he’d felt all of the weariness of however long it had been pile onto his bones.</p><p>“Wouldn’t have pegged you for a dancer,” Cam had said, and Umar had laughed and told him, “Actually, I’m a dancer first and a person second.”</p><p>“I’ll drink to that,” Cam had said, reaching into an inner pocket of his leather jacket for a shining silver flask. Belatedly, Umar had remembered that Cameron wasn’t completely a person anymore himself. When Cam offered him the flask, he’d taken a healthy swig, wincing at the cheap, too-sweet bourbon flavor.</p><p>“Your taste is terrible,” Umar had said, really only meaning the whiskey, and Cam had laughed and agreed in a tone of voice that implied that he was talking about much more than his taste in liquor, and before the next song was over, they’d moved deeper into the tunnel, out of the way of the harshest echoes of the music to hear each other speak.</p><p>Now, Cam is napping, because even if he isn’t quite a person anymore, Umar supposed he isn’t quite anything else, either. He seems like someone more likely to pull all-nighters for the occasional drama of it than because he can’t sleep, so Umar supposes it isn’t a surprise that he’s dropped off quickly, not after however-long-it’s-been since this endless after-party began. Umar would leave him to it, but there’s something that feels primally <em>wrong</em> about leaving a sleeping body alone and undefended in these tunnels, even if the body belongs to a fear-avatar meant to be in his element. And anyway, Cam has fallen asleep against his shoulder, and Umar, much as sleep is an old enemy which almost always fails to be caught, is tired too. It’s here that they’re still sitting, both resting in one way or another, when a woman who looks a solid fifty years older than most of the partygoers emerges from the crowd, turns down the corridor, and makes her way toward them.</p><p>“Oh, this won’t do at all, little nobody,” she says, towering over where they’re sitting on the floor, slumped against the tunnel wall. “He belongs to the Slaughter now, and the only question is whether the fact that he’s already worm-food will save him from being consumed by it. Either way, he’s certainly not one of yours.”</p><p>“One of mine?” Umar is certain it hasn’t been long since he was last shouting across the dance floor to someone, but his voice still comes out creaky with disuse. Against his shoulder, Cam shifts in his sleep, a living reminder that Umar is not alone with this strange specter of a woman who feels more otherworldly even than Marian at her most cryptic.</p><p>“Yes, paradox though it is, even The Lonely One, the single face unblended into every crowd, the eternal uncomforted, has followers.”</p><p>She’s saying it like this, obscure and grandiose, to try to get Umar to ask her to clarify, to get him to engage by hooking his curiosity — Umar has little sisters, he knows how this goes, and he doesn’t like her tone when she talks about Cameron, either. He stays quiet, but he doesn’t break eye-contact with her as the stares down imperiously.</p><p>After a moment of fraught eye-contact, she smiles, a slow, creeping grin. “Of course, all of your followers will, ultimately, be as alone as you are, so the fact of the collective doesn’t really mean much, does it?”</p><p>She sounds so certain, and for a moment, Umar can feel it like she means it — so many individuals, beautiful and crystalized in their own solitude, bound back to him by ties of their own aloneness, as on their own in their homes, jobs, families as he is right now, ten feet away from a never-ending dance party teeming with his peers, a sleeping guy who would never tie himself to Umar when there’s a more self-destructive option available tucked up tight against his side in this drafty corridor. It is terrible and immutable and perfect, and it’s just within his reach. Umar shakes his head to dislodge the feeling, even as it creeps.</p><p>“No, if we’re doing this, I’m not going to play it like that.”</p><p>“What?” she says, and he has the momentary satisfaction of hearing that knowing tone slip.</p><p>“If that’s who I am, if the power is mine, to take and to use,” he says, and pauses, waiting for her confirmation.</p><p>“It is,” she says, certainty back, tone coaxing. “You can feel it, can’t you? It is only the natural way of things, you have always been bounded by your own perceptions, just as every other person on this planet is limited by their self-ness. Books, poems, love, friendship — they’re all illusions, attempts to break a barrier that defines all life.”</p><p>Umar nods, because that all feels a bit heavy-handed, but it’s true enough, as far as it goes. “But if the power’s mine — the power and the paradox, the tie that binds ever lonely human soul — so, you know, every human soul there is — to me, then I can use it.” He smiles up at her. “Precedent isn’t destiny. If it’s my power, and my fear, I can channel it into something else.”</p><p>He’s hoping for a return to the shaken tone, the feeling that he’s surprised her, but instead, she only grins again. “You are free, of course, to try to use the power in whatever way you wish,” she says. Umar knows there’s menace, there’s doubt, there’s more of that horrible <em>knowing</em> under the words, but it doesn’t matter: the power is his, now. He’ll show her what he can do with it.</p><p>…</p><p>After The Lonely emerges from He-Who-Was-Umar, The Buried One’s new friend, he waits until The Slaughter’s coming out party for her new, fractious consort has quieted before he takes his leave of them.</p><p>“It really is a wonderful — er — kingdom, Marian,” he says, leaning down to kiss her cheek, “And I appreciate your welcome here, but it’s not my place.”</p><p>The Slaughter nods. It isn’t his place. It can’t be, because it’s hers. Then The Lonely One turns to The Buried and reaches out for a hug.</p><p>“Go forth and multiply,” The Buried One says.</p><p>It’s a senseless thing to say to The Lonely, but The Lonely only smiles and says, “That’s the idea,” with a crooked grin on his face, and The Slaughter reflects that he may be one to watch. The Buried One really does have such interesting taste in friends.</p><p>Later, “Our underground boy is going overground,” Marian says — just to herself, this time, workshopping it, but the line is a good one, so she stores it away for later use. There are plenty of uses for good lines now, now that they have power like they’ve only ever daydreamed of, and so much of that power tied up in the focus of her own — and now of their — followers.</p><p>It’s what she wanted, it’s what they both wanted, but Marian’s king has never known how to accept what he’s been given with grace. He’s thrashing at the traces she’s set for him, and she can only hope he’ll see this gift they’ve been given for what it is soon — before it’s too late to enjoy it.</p><p>She’ll miss The Lonely One, of course, and the singularity and distinction that his presence lends to her court, but hers is not a crowd he can disappear into, and she understands the necessity of his going. More than that, she thinks that perhaps it is the memory of his own once-singularity which is causing her tortured little consort to chafe at the sacrifice offered for him in exchange for their kingdom. Perhaps a little distance will be for the best, for all of their sakes.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>